Seven
by heofBOOYAH
Summary: Seven protagonists, stripped down to their most basic elements and brought together in a single, original world and story. Seven pissed off young men, each declaring war in his own way on a different type of crime, gathering together to achieve their shared and individual goals for justice. Tame at first, but rated M as a warning of future chapters.
1. Bodyguard

Ten stories of top-of-the-top-of-the line security, and somehow those psychotic Robin Hood wannabes had still managed to get into the building. Joey desperately wanted to beat the crap out of the girl's father, who had promised that the building was completely secure. A man whose only daughter was being targeted by deranged killers had zero excuse for such useless security, especially when he was one of those one percent types. At this point, Joey was her only chance, which sucked for him since she annoyed the hell out of him. Putting aside his frustration, he made a last review of the situation.

The luxury suite where the dumbass had "hidden" his daughter was basically a fully functioning household (aristocratic excess for the win), complete with a small "guest room" - his room while he was guarding her. Setting aside the fact that anyone whose hotel room had its own guest room had too much damn money, it wasn't completely horrible from a tactical standpoint. The intruders would probably arrive armed with illegal weapons and in contraband body armor of some kind, and all the metal in that gear would become their enemy as soon as they walked through the door. Joey had insisted on setting up multiple custom security measures within the suite itself, the first of which was a shit-ton of tear gas set off by the metal detectors hidden in the door frame. That was the closest thing to a warning shot the enemy would get from Joey. At 17 years old, he was as uncompromising as a mature, trained soldier, and he didn't have to worry about the rule books used by the armed forces.

As the so-called "social activists" progressed through the suite, they would instinctively check first the bedroom, then the bathroom, the kitchen, the various room-sized closets, and finally discover Joey's little hideaway. According to the path he knew the enemy would take, Joey had set up a number of booby traps in every part of the suite, and each place they looked for the girl would be more deadly than the last. The setup of the rooms meant Joey's room would be the last area they found, at which point most of them would have been rendered comatose, permanently crippled, or (hopefully) dead. He had also created anti-weapon traps that would corrode metal, water-log firing systems, and generally wreck most guns. By the time the intruders got through all that, their fully armed party of 30-something would be reduced to about seven, with only two or three assault rifles left. The final trap was Joey himself. Unfortunately, the conditions weren't exactly ideal for combat.

The room was long and narrow, extending straight back from the door. Entering the room, there was a one-person bed/couch thing on the left, towards the back, with a dresser topped with a fish tank on the opposite wall. The doors to the closet and the bathroom were on the left, between the bed/couch and the door. Behind the bed/couch, the room hooked to the right into an L-shape, making room for the small kitchen that had nothing useful in it whatsoever. Why would the girl's father endanger her with (potentially useful) knives when the servants could do all the cutting for her? Joey hated that man and his stupidity with a passion. However, more problematic than that man's idiocy was the girl's terror. She was sitting on the bed couch with her knees pulled up to her chest, trembling silently. In her condition, she probably wouldn't respond quickly to any instructions he gave her. All Joey could do was stand between her and the door and wait.


	2. Man of Stone

For her part, the girl, Selena Victoria Doverton, was the archetypal damsel in distress; blonde, blue-eyed, inordinately busty for a girl of 16, and completely terrified. She was experiencing genuine fear for the first time in her rich white girl life, and she wasn't handling it well. She had known, of course, that she was being targeted, but the threat had never seemed real while she was hidden behind Daddy's unbreakable protection, which was naturally the best money could buy. But at some point in the last few hours, that barrier had inexplicably crumbled, and now she was faced with the reality of imminent death. Cold, metallic sweat was slowly soaking her blue silk dress, but she was too insensate to even notice. Her bodyguard wasn't helping either. He was just standing in front of her, facing away and towards the door. He wasn't calling for help or looking for an escape route or even trying to make her feel better. He was just standing there, hands in the pockets of his patched up jeans, seeming to retreat pensively into his big black trench coat. At length, he took off the coat and tossed it next to her on the bed, revealing a black T-shirt that was distractingly tight even to her disoriented mind. More distracting than his muscled arms was the six inch knife at his right hip. Seeing it must have made her gasp unconsciously, because he turned and looked at her for the first time in ten minutes and flatly asked, "What?"

She managed to whisper something about no weapons in the suite. Joey's response was cold and curt. "I don't want to hear a damn thing along the lines of 'My daddy said,' because the only reason the guys trying to kill you are in this building is that he was too incompetent to keep them out. Your father has no idea what the hell he's doing, so I've been protecting you MY way behind his back."

She normally would have tried to slap him for saying that, but she was too preoccupied to care. "Do you have any other weapons?" she whispered.

"Unfortunately, this was the only thing I could sneak in here with your dad breathing down my neck," he answered, cold as ever. With that, he turned back to the door, knife in hand, signaling that the conversation was over. For some reason, knowing that Joey didn't have any other weapons in the building actually made Selena feel a little better. After a moment of thinking, she realized she just didn't trust Joey Connors.

Selena had never liked Joey to begin with. He was abrasive, distant, and had a strangely dark air about him, like he hadn't felt happiness in a long time. His short brown hair and adolescent stubble seemed normal enough at first, but there were a couple details that made him seem ominous to her. His green eyes gleamed in a way that, to Selena, was more harsh than vibrant. A couple fellow schoolgirls who had met him had giggled about his "emerald eyes," but Selena had always thought of them as more of a venomous green.

The big thing, though, was the scar. A thin straight line that started above the left eye, cut diagonally through the eyebrow and just past the outside corner of the eye, down to his cheek. There was a story behind that scar that Selena wasn't sure she wanted to know. The one time she had asked about it, Joey had said something about a car crash. Selena felt sure that if that was the truth, he wouldn't have been radiating a strong aura of wanting to kill someone when he talked about it.

She was startled from her stupor by a sudden noise from downstairs and uttered the beginnings of a frightened squeal before Joey clamped a hand over her mouth and just whispered to her to "Shut up shut up shut up shut up" until she listened. Once she was relatively calm, he turned back to the door. After a moment, Joey put the knife back into its sheath and removed the entire assemblage from his belt. After stowing it on the far side of the fish tank from the door, he turned and glared her into silence before she could ask why he was putting his weapon away.

While Selena wondered what the hell Joey was doing, Joey worked out how he was going to deal with this mess. If the intruders entered the room and saw a guy waiting with a knife, they would shoot on sight. He would have to play the frightened teenager for a bit to get them off guard, but that wouldn't be enough. It was time to prepare his final counterinsurgency measures, which given his resources wouldn't be very advanced. Mostly they involved punching really hard and keeping Selena out of sight. Indicating with a finger to his lips to keep silent, he took her hand and helped her off the bed, and then just stood there, waiting. Selena felt a brief, gentle squeeze of her hand, and realized a moment later that this was the closest thing to a word of comfort she was likely to get from a guy like Joey. Grateful in spite of herself, she squeezed back in thanks. Selena was instantly irritated with herself for thinking of this as "holding hands." She hadn't been able to get thoughts like that out of her head since she saw him pounding a heavy bag with his shirt off about three weeks ago. Joey wasn't troubled by any such thoughts, and was just waiting for the right time to move.

By this time, the sound of gathering invaders had built to a low roar outside the suite. Joey tensed in anticipation. The minute they breached the main door and the tear gas trap went off, he used the noisy chaos to cover the sounds of him leading Selena as far back into the kitchen as possible. As the men outside yelled their surprise and considerable discomfort, Joey quickly and quietly grabbed a water bottle on the way back to the living area of the room to prepare one final trick. He balanced the bottle upright on the edge of the bed/couch near the door, rearranged all the pillows, and stood by the opposite corner of the bed. When the moment was right, he would nudge the carefully placed bedding with his leg, which in turn would nudge and topple the precariously balanced water bottle. The intruders would reflexively look at the falling object, and that would be Joey's only chance.

Crouched in the kitchen corner out of sight of the main guest room, Selena shivered as she listened to the pained cries from outside; the primal screams of the invaders were absolutely nightmarish. She understood that the people in pain wanted her dead, but something innately human in her wanted to curl into a ball and whimper when it heard someone shriek like that. Suddenly, she realized that anyone who made it to Joey's door would be incredibly angry by the time they did. Selena began to feel worried, not for herself, but for the boy guarding her. Joey was obviously tough as nails, but he still wasn't much older than she was, and he was resigning himself to a death match with grown men. This line of thought introduced an important but so far overlooked question: Why was Joey even there? What was the point of risking his life for someone he obviously despised? It seemed uncharacteristically admirable of him to protect Selena at his own expense, and she wondered if she was guilty of a terrible misjudgment of Joey's character. For as long as she had known him, she had regarded him with distaste, distrust, and even fear. Now he was standing between her and a gang of psychos. What if Joey died because of her?

Before she could even begin to consider an answer, the door to the guest room crashed open, followed by a loud confusion of voices. She faintly made out Joey asking why a street rat like him would protect a "wannabe princess" like her, which would have stung if she hadn't been so busy being freaked out. There was a momentary lull where the voices were quieter, she heard a small object fall, and then... The screaming started again. Hearing it without the muffling effect of the walls made the sound feel a thousand times closer, which made it feel a thousand times worse. Selena buried her face in her knees, shaking and trying not to sob. She couldn't tell if any of the screams were coming from Joey. She tried to distract herself with thoughts of family and friends, but all she could think was that the people after her might also target the people close to her. In the midst of her terror and dejection, the sounds of violence paused without warning. Someone, not Joey, whispered "stone" in a terrified voice, and a moment later the fighting resumed with new intensity. Trying again to distract herself, Selena tried to focus on wondering what rocks had to do with any of this.

In the midst of her thoughts, which were going nowhere, she heard a voice rise above the ruckus, demanding to know why Joey wouldn't die. Out of the blue, Selena remembered a nasty rumor from about a month ago. "Stone" wasn't a thing; it was a name. "Stone" was like a modern-day folk tale, a boogeyman for gangsters and cops alike. "Stone" was one of America's most wanted fugitives, suspected of everything from vigilantism to arson. "Stone" was some kind of freak; a human tank that felt no pain and mutilated anyone who got in his way. There was a legend of a time Stone had been attacked while in stitches from a previous fight. When the threads were torn loose by the struggle, Stone pulled them out with his own hands and used his sutures to strangle his enemy. Joey Connors had recently been suspected of being Stone. Selena had watched Joey look an FBI executive in the eye and say he was innocent. She knew now that he had been lying.

Thing had been going well for Joey at first. Only five people had made it through the hell he'd left him, and they didn't seem to realize that two of the three assault rifles they had managed to hold on to were no longer functional. The odds were much better than he had anticipated, and he had predicted their behavior perfectly. The intruders instinctively halted when they saw a scruffy young man in jeans instead of the aristocratic young lady they were looking for. The inevitable "Who are you? Where is she?" bit gave Joey a few extra moments to assess the enemy threat level. There were three rifles left, only one of which worked, but multiple handguns that looked like they still functioned. That would be an important factor. He could only stall for a few seconds, but he didn't need any longer than that to use the water bottle gambit, which worked perfectly.

He seized the momentary distraction as fully as possible, jamming both thumbs into the eyes of the nearest man, who was carrying one of the dud assault rifles. The man with the other compromised rifle was afraid of shooting his comrade, but the remaining three opened fire, which was exactly what Joey wanted. He used the newly blind man as a meat shield; while he was finished off by his own teammates, Joey pulled the handgun from the man's hip and got off three shots before someone decided to charge him. All three bullets hit a separate enemy's torso, and the one coming right at him was just making Joey's life easy. While three of the remaining four collapsed in shocking pain, Joey swiftly backpedaled away from the last man standing. He drew the knife stowed behind the fish tank, out of the enemy's line of sight, and another one was down. The three men Joey had shot were regaining a semblance of composure, but Joey had miscalculated his third shot. With his aim thrown off by the guy who'd charged him, the last bullet had only hit a shoulder. Significantly better health allowed that one's good arm to catch Joey with a surprise right cross. It didn't even draw blood, but it checked Joey's momentum and cost him the advantage. Before he knew it, he had been beaten to the ground through sheer force, and the one working assault rifle was staring him in the face.

That slow motion moment ended when Joey knocked the barrel away just as the trigger was squeezed. The bastard holding it literally shot himself in the foot, and Joey was back on top. He had lost his knife while the intruders were pounding him, but their injuries were a lot worse than his. He was about to break a guy's neck when shot-foot managed to get up on his good leg and shoved Joey into a wall. Totally pinned, Joey started to go down under the renewed assault. He felt a rib or two crack, and someone's foot completely shattered his right hand. But it was all good. He had found his knife. Using his left hand, Joey swung the blade up directly into a fist that was on its way down, taking off a finger and a half. While the man screamed, Joey grabbed his sleeve in his broken right hand and yanked the bastard within face-stabbing distance. Three dead, two to go.

Joey stubbornly regained his footing, ignoring the blows that continued to fall. Tossing the knife aside just to show off, he grabbed one man's index and little fingers and twisted them out, away from the palm, twisted them until they faced backwards, until they faced forwards again. While he howled in pain, Joey whirled around and, with his broken right hand, broke the nose of the only man still in fighting shape. The two surviving enemies were, at this point, scared shitless. As the enemy with the twisted fingers kept wailing, the one with the broken nose just stared at this kid, suddenly realizing who his group had been fighting. "Stone," he muttered. Joey just stood there with a "come at me" attitude. The two intruders managed to renew their attack through sheer terror-fueled adrenaline. In the general flurry of combat, every weapon in the room was dropped and picked up half a dozen times, not necessarily by its owner. Joey laughed inwardly when an assault rifle failed to discharge. He wasn't giving them time to see if the others still worked, so the pulled their handguns. The two men started furiously emptying their magazines trying to bring Joey down. With the way he kept weaving between and behind them, they had a better chance of killing each other.

Eventually, the one with the broken nose did waste his last shot on his last ally, and the fight reached a decisive tipping point. They had been given taser guns before starting their mission – they were supposed to save them for the target to make her death more painful – but the last intruder standing pulled his out in desperation. The two barbs caught in the meat of Joey's right upper arm, attached to the weapon by thin wires that sizzled with current. Time seemed to slow as he was absorbed by the searing sting of electricity. Joey groaned with the strain of trying to stay upright, stumbling into the dresser on his left as the limits of his incredible pain tolerance were reached for the first time in years. In front of his face was the random empty fish tank on top of the dresser. The man with the taser was also right next to the dresser and the tank, facing him with the taser in his left hand, which gave Joey an idea. Focusing on the fact that the weapon discharged a set amount of current at a set speed, meaning the pain couldn't get any worse, he forced his body two obey and half-punched, half slung his broken right fist through the glass of the tank, drenching both of their right arms in water. Using the liquid to help conduct the charge, Stone directed the current into his enemy by gripping the man's dripping wrist with his own dripping hand.

The assassin bellowed out a primal howl that ripped through the air. Both combatants started to cave and fall as the intruder, unable to control his body properly, struggled to release the device that was torturing them both. After a time that was impossible to measure because it felt like eternity, the weapon clattered to the floor, interrupting the circuit. Two gasping brawlers crumpled in exhaustion, but one shot his left hand up, clutching the dresser and trying to haul himself onto his feet. As he rose, gravity kept the taser firmly on the ground, and the barbs in Stone's arm were slowly ripped out – not that Stone really gave a shit. The would-be killer stared dumbly at this psychotic son of a bitch who seemed somehow exempt from human limits. In his exhausted state, he almost didn't realize that he should probably get up to. When it did dawn on him that Joey Stone wasn't exactly planning to go grab a beer, fear overcame pain and the intruder fought to get up. Seeing Stone's knife on the floor, he grabbed it in his left hand, surged upwards, and brought the blade down point-first at the boy's face.

Completely unfazed, Joey caught the wrist of the knife-wielding hand in his right, and grabbed the enemy's free hand in his left, grappling with him. Joey knew that his right hand wouldn't be able to hold the knife back for long with all the abuse it had taken, but he wasn't worried about the outcome of the fight. He shoved the man's left hand up against the wall behind the dresser, and then gave a little with his right, allowing the knife to move because he wanted it to. Instead of trying to force the guy's hand straight back, he turned to the side – but not out, away from their bodies. Stone turned the momentum of the knife hand to his left, bringing it between the torsos of the struggling fighters, and driving it through both of the hands that were up against the wall. The speared Stone's left hand, the enemy's right hand, and buried itself in the wall with a dull thud. The murdering bastard let out yet another ear-splitting howl of pain, but Joey Stone wasn't letting him pull the knife out. Letting go of the man's wrist for just a moment, Joey punched him in the throat. In his weakened condition, the blow wasn't deadly, but it stopped the intruder from struggling. As the failed assassin coughed and sputtered, grabbing his throat with his free hand, Joey grabbed the handle of the knife and started jerking it from side to side, just to cause a little extra pain. The terrified man wailed as best he could with his breath still coming in gasps. Before the intruder could make a move to save himself, Joey ripped the knife out of the wall, out of their hands, and straight into the enemy's left eye. The blade bit into bone and got stuck there as horrible screams tore through the night. Unable to get the blade out of the bastard's face, Joey placed his free left hand and his right foot on the guy's torso and forced him off. As the last of the intruders fell backwards onto the floor, Joey half-lunged, half-fell after him to end everything by sinking the full length of the knife's blade into the man's throat.

Behind Joey in the kitchen, Selena stared in numb shock. After the last bullet had been fired, the transition to the taser had been so quiet compared to gunfire that Selena's ears hadn't been sure if they were still hearing the sounds of combat. Wondering if the fight had ended at that point, the girl had foolishly left her cover to see for herself. She saw what Joey did with the taser and the fish tank, with the knife in the wall, and finally how Joey killed the man. Nothing in her life had prepared her to process and cope with the things she had just seen and heard, and all she could do was stand there.

The siege on the suite was over, but Joey's adrenaline hadn't yet faded. He used the leftover energy to haul himself away from the bodies onto the couch-bed, wanting to find something soft before the pain set in, which he knew would happen all too soon. Contrary to urban myth and the perception of his enemies, Joey Stone was still flesh, blood, and mortal. His right arm, put through so much abuse throughout the battle, finally failed him as he tried to pull himself up onto the sofa-thing. Seeing him start to fall, Selena reflexively crossed over to help him, not knowing or caring why. It was only at that point that Joey realized she had left the kitchen. He grumbled inwardly but was too tired to reprimand her for disobeying instructions. They sat next to each other on what they Joey had decided to think of as just a couch. While Joey's adrenaline receded and tried to focus on something other than his growing pain, Selena looked at something warm and wet on her arms and torso. She froze, wide-eyed, at the sight of Joey's blood, which had gotten all over her when she helped him up. She whipped her head to the right to see Joey's battered body, and her breath caught in her throat.

In all the chaos, Joey's shirt had been torn to shreds, mostly by his own knife, as the madmen hunting her had tried to destroy the flesh underneath the fabric. There were cuts and bruises all over his torso, his arms, and especially his hand. In addition to the development of the most horrifying bruise Selena could imagine, Joey's right hand was sporting several deep cuts and a couple shards of glass. His face wasn't much better than the rest of him, with his nose and lip bloodied, cuts around his eyes, and a cheek that looked like it would swell soon. As Selena kept looking, she saw something else, beneath the blood and the remains of Joey's shirt. She saw more scars on his torso than she knew what to make of, scars of all lengths and thicknesses. Some were red and looked fresh, others were faded and looked like they'd been there for years. There must have been dozens.

Joey caught her staring and turned his head to look at her. Not caring to make the effort of using speech, he asked with his eyes, "What?"

Selena hesitated nervously; she was somewhat afraid of how he would react to what was obviously a personal question. "Uhh," she stammered, "where did you get – that is, all those scars – how, I mean –?" Joey understood her question but didn't answer. He just raised his eyebrows at her and smiled cheerlessly to point out how stupid her question was. "Right," Selena said, "right, that's kind of obvious…" The silence felt empty and strange after the ruckus earlier, so she tried to think of another question. Two big ones came to mind. "You were lying about not being stone, weren't you?"

Joey looked at her with vague amusement. "Stone is pretty high on the most wanted list right now," he pointed out. "Whether I'm him or not, I'm going to deny it." It was exhausting just to get the words out, and she was getting on his nerves, but the conversation at least gave him something to focus on other than his wounds. "But if you have any questions that aren't stupid, I'd rather think about them than my hand."

Selena was brought up short by this; he seemed to have just issued an open invitation to learn whatever she wanted about him. She turned away, facing forward now, and tried to think. She realized after a moment that all the obvious questions related to his life as Stone, and would probably go unanswered. Nonetheless, she had to ask about one particular rumor. "Did you really kill a guy with your stitches?"

Joey suppressed the urge to laugh, knowing it would hurt. "No, but I did get jumped by a few guys while I was in stitches," he said. "I guess they thought I would be more vulnerable. They were right, but I still won pretty quickly. The thing was, though, that my stitches got pulled in a way that made them tear at my skin, so I used a pocket knife to cut through parts of them and retie the sutures until I could reach an actual doctor."

Selena whirled back to face him. "You redid your stitches? Just like that?"

"Yeah, I guess one of those guys was still awake and saw me do it," he said. "Stories like that get exaggerated really quickly."

Selena sat in silence for a moment, digesting his answer and trying to think of the next question to ask. Then she remembered the really important one she'd thought of while hiding in the kitchen. "You don't like me at all. I don't like you either," she said slowly. "So…"

"So?" he prompted, not sure why she was stating the obvious.

"Why did you protect me?"


End file.
